Adrift in a Laundromat

THE TENTS OF WICKEDNESS (276 pp.)--Peter De Vries--Little, Brown ($3.75).

Peter De Vries had a lunch date in Manhattan recently with visiting British Novelist Kingsley Amis. De Vries spared no effort to round up a third for lunch, his New Yorker colleague, E. B. ("Andy"') White. The anticipated lunatic-fringe benefit: De Vries would breeze home to Westport, Conn, and tell his wife: "I had lunch today with Amis and Andy."

As it happened, the lunch never came off. and De Vries, like a character in one of his novels (Comfort Me with Apples, The Mackerel Plaza. The Tunnel of Love), was left wistfully savoring the sour cream of the jest. This touch of rueful, pun-prone phantasmagoria has made 49-year-old Peter De Vries the leading comic geographer of commuterland. Humorist De Vries surveys his world with the wacky vision of a man who has inadvertently put on the wrong pair of glasses.

Nothing could be more wackily multifocal than The Tents of Wickedness, a story told through a sequence of parodies of other writers, among them Marquand, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Proust, Joyce and Kafka. The reader may come to feel that he has been washed, rinsed and spun dry in a literary Laundromat.

What Is Chastity? Originally planned as part of Comfort Me with Apples (TIME, April 30, 1953). the new book almost seems like a double take of the earlier novel. The hero is again Chick Swallow, the poor man's Freud, who writes a lonelyhearts column called "The Lamplighter." His chief anxiety is still his sophomoric brother-in-law Nickie Sherman, a fool in bon motley. In Comfort, Nickie salvaged his ego by catching a crook; in Tents, Nickie becomes a crook, at odd hours, and ends up chasing his own split personality. In Comfort, the happily married Chick found himself unaccountably in bed with an art-loving Mrs. Thicknesse; in Tents, the still happily married Chick all but fathers a child by an art-loving bohemianette named Sweetie Appleyard. Everyone gets back on an even keel just in time to sail into De Vries's moral harbor: "The conformity we often glibly equate with mediocrity isn't something free spirits 'transcend' as much as something they're not quite up to."

Author De Vries has rationed his wordplay in Tents and cut down on the puns and epigrams. Samples: "persona non Groton," "the Symbol Simons of literature," "What is chastity but an overemphasis on sex?" In Tents, the literary parodies are the thing, and some of them are hilariously apt.

> Hemingway: "'You were all right in there. How did you know what you'd find? There might have been a rat . . .' 'It was nothing,' the Colonel shrugged, doing it well, a thing not really usually done well at all . . . We sat with our brandies, keeping talking about style."

> Faulkner: "They stood in total darkness, one which was not only the absence of light but the obliteration of the twenty years and more since which they had last stood here, now as then, then as now, waiting in the still unblasted dark while the footsteps came down the stair in trancelike recapitulation of those other footsteps linked forever in his mind with the smell of anthracite; that anthracite of which there were now only a few lumps left, the furnace having been converted to oil. as he either knew from hearsay or maybe sensed in some quantitive modification of the probably thirty cubic feet of blackness in which they stood --always had stood and maybe always quintessentially would . . . thinking while the teeth transposed themselves into a smile 'This is it. At last I'm going mad, thank God.' "

> Joyce: "So little thyme. Sanctuary much . . . Remembrance of Things Pabst. that's the story of our life . . . Him laying in bed drunk singing as I dropped my shift on the cold hotel room floor, Sister Carrie Me Back to Old Virginibus Puerisque. It's all a welter mitty in my head . . ."

Quatrain with Katinka. Welter mitty and all. De Vries tenaciously makes his point: much modern literature is juvenile, if not delinquent. Something less than a great wit and more than a facile wisecracker. De Vries writes the kind of humane comedy that hinges on errors rather than manners. He begins by making man's special foibles convulsively funny, and ends by drawing the reader toward a wryly reflective communion with all human frailty, including his own.

. . .

Human frailty is something for which De Vries has a keen eye, having been raised by Dutch immigrant parents who were stern Calvinists. His father was an iceman and furniture mover "who parlayed what he had into a factory." Young De Vries was sent to Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Mich., disappointed his parents by not training for the ministry. At one time or another, he has done just about everything else. He has been a radio actor, moving man, women's club lecturer (on Dylan Thomas et al.), associate editor and co-editor of Poetry magazine, has serviced a flock of candy-vending machines, sold taffy apples wholesale in suburban Chicago.

At Poetry. De Vries met Katinka Loeser, "when she was bouncing quatrains off the moon, too." and the ten-room, one-acre De Vries place in Westport now bounces with the following quatrain: Jan, 14, Peter, 12, Emily, 9. and Derek, 6. In winter, says De Vries, "I take the kids out and skate like my father did on the frozen canals of Holland, with the kids strung out behind me like a bunch of Dutchmen." He is happy that he is too old and his children too young to be beatniks. Says he: "The beats just sit around contemplating each other's navels. In the '20s we had people like--well. I'll go no further than Maxwell Bodenheim. He once walked into the office and accused me of having a face unmarked by sorrow. I didn't know what to do. I just took the day off and went home."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.